Ansible is developed and released on a flexible 4 months release cycle.
This cycle can be extended in order to allow for larger changes to be properly
implemented and tested before a new release is made available.

Starting with Ansible-2.4, support lasts for 3 releases. Thus Ansible-2.4 will receive
security and general bug fixes when it is first released, security and critical bug fixes when
2.5 is released, and only security fixes once 2.6 is released.

New modules, plugins, features and bugfixes will always be integrated in what will become the next
major version of Ansible. This work is tracked on the devel git branch.

Ansible provides bugfixes and security improvements for the most recent major release. The previous
major release will only receive fixes for security issues and critical bugs. Ansible only applies
security fixes to releases which are two releases old. This work is tracked on the
stable-<version> git branches.

Note

Support for three major releases began with Ansible-2.4. Ansible-2.3 and older versions
are only supported for two releases with the first stage including both security and general bug
fixes while the second stage includes security and critical bug fixes

The fixes that land in supported stable branches will eventually be released
as a new version when necessary.

Note that while there are no guarantees for providing fixes for unsupported
releases of Ansible, there can sometimes be exceptions for critical issues.

Before a new release or version of Ansible can be done, it will typically go
through a release candidate process.

This provides the Ansible community the opportunity to test Ansible and report
bugs or issues they might come across.

Ansible tags the first release candidate (RC1) which is usually scheduled
to last five business days. The final release is done if no major bugs or
issues are identified during this period.

If there are major problems with the first candidate, a second candidate will
be tagged (RC2) once the necessary fixes have landed.
This second candidate lasts for a shorter duration than the first.
If no problems have been reported after two business days, the final release is
done.

More release candidates can be tagged as required, so long as there are
bugs that the Ansible core maintainers consider should be fixed before the
final release.

Sometimes we need to remove a feature, normally in favor of a reimplementation that we hope does a better job.
To do this we have a deprecation cycle. First we mark a feature as ‘deprecated’. This is normally accompanied with warnings
to the user as to why we deprecated it, what alternatives they should switch to and when (which version) we are scheduled
to remove the feature permanently.

The cycle is normally across 4 feature releases (2.x.y, where the x marks a feature release and the y a bugfix release),
so the feature is normally removed in the 4th release after we announce the deprecation.
For example, something deprecated in 2.5 will be removed in 2.9, assuming we don’t jump to 3.x before that point.
The tracking is tied to the number of releases, not the release numbering.

For modules/plugins, we keep the documentation after the removal for users of older versions.